It has long been depressingly obvious that last Friday’s elections to the Iranian parliament were not going to be a cliffhanger. As soon as the faction of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, an overlap of fundamentalists and more worldly vested interests of the Islamic Republic, came under challenge from reformists and pragmatic conservatives led by two former presidents, the regime’s enforcers and mullahs sprang into preventive action.

The success of the interior ministry and Council of Guardians, a theocratic watchdog, in rooting out and disqualifying candidates who challenged the government, guaranteed Mr Ahmadi-Nejad would continue to hold sway in the Majlis.

Yet incomplete results suggest he will not have it all his own way.

First, the reformers have kept a foothold in parliament. The regime will therefore find it difficult to exclude them from next year’s presidential election. Second, heavyweight conservatives such as Ali Larijani, the former nuclear negotiator, and Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, the mayor of Tehran, are still in the game. While it seems that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader at the centre of Iran’s delicate balance of power, feels more comfortable with a hardline mediocrity like Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, he also cultivates rivals for high office from the same camp to head off any challenge to his own position.

Third and perhaps most important, however, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s blend of messianism and populism has brought Iranians rocketing prices, food shortages and petrol rationing rather than the jobs and access to services they desperately need. His disdain for basic economics, especially his use of the treasury and the banking system as a piggybank for the poor, is turning into an inflation tax on those who can least afford it – his voters.

How should the west and Iran’s neighbours react to this?

Sanctions aimed at punishing Iran’s nuclear programme have helped contribute to the government’s unpopularity. But at the same time they help the mullahs rally Iranians around the regime – and have failed to stop Iran enriching uranium that could eventually be used to make a nuclear bomb.

The now much diminished prospect of a US attack on Iran, by contrast, has opened up debate in Iran, and gives Washington a chance to offer Tehran a bargain that would include: international supervision of its nuclear activities in exchange for security guarantees and economic ties that give Iran status and an interest in stability in the Middle East. But that may have to await the result of the US elections.